Globex Corporation Newsletter

I spent all day yesterday tracking down T911, then, finally contacting her by phone and catching up for about two hours.

Who's T911? Let me explain.

A week before my 24th birthday I took my first TV job at the mighty KDLT in Sioux Falls, SD. I was the new guy, the know-it-all (thankfully I never act like that anymore...) who was probably a little too loud and a little too talkative (sound familiar, la Güera?). I had gone to school for TV production, but this was real world operations stuff, not theoretical textbook stuff. This was get the job done, make a decision in an instant and live with the consequences TV.

I got by, I learned the job from the people working there. I worked closely with T911 two days a week (I worked a really funky schedule that I ended up loving) and learned a ton from her, mostly about preparation about knowing what was coming next, as much as you can in live TV, and being ready for it.

One of the things we did together was build spot reel. It's a skill that I'm sure is being lost with all of the station automation that operators have access to these days. What this entailed was editing spots that would be needed during the next broadcast day onto a single reel, sometimes more than 4 spots to a break. This could be a straight forward process, but to save time, we would do it in real time as much as possible, rolling a tape and taking it as the previous spot ended so that as much of the reel could be build without having to stop.

Besides doing a job that needed to be done, building spot reel gave us an acute understanding of the equipment we were working with, we knew exactly how long it took to rewind a 30 second spot, for instance. We learned to cue a tape in a minimum amount of time. T911 and I got really good at this, at working together, so good that we would finish our assigned duties long before necessary and would sit around and BS a lot.

The other 3 days, T911 worked with this other guy who she probably didn't enjoy working with as much. He had enough skill, but just didn't want to do the job. I learned from him, too. I learned that to be effective in an operations environment, first you had to care. Caring was 95% of the job, caring about what your air looked like. He didn't care and it showed on air. I also learned important lessons about kissing ass and why I never want to do that.

I was in my mid twenties and I learned the TV business, the good and the bad. T911 taught me a lots She also taught me a lot about myself.

An interesting thing about the BOJ who worked at KDLT, he was a married guy. I got married and took my KDLT job three months later. I was there over two years, the (mostly) happily married operator. When I lost that job, I was separated 3 months later. The people I worked with at KDLT are the only ones who know me as a married guy. That's weird when I look back on it because I've been a decidedly single guy in every other job I've ever had.

I've probably rambled enough for one day. NFL football is starting up and I could use some coffee.

Welcome aboard, T911!

BOJ